Acura really is the whipping boy of the midsize luxury niche. Swing a fanbelt and you’ll hit half a dozen reviewers calling into question nearly everything about the new Acura RLX that can be called, save its birth mother.

For background, the 2014 RLX is the latest iteration of the RL, an all-wheel-drive top of the Acura line car that bowed with the 2005 model year. It sold well in the first year, but went downhill after that. Why? Beats me. Frankly, I liked the car but apparently a lot of people didn’t. Many criticized it as an overpriced Honda Accord (Acura is Honda’s upscale line) and that may be a fair assessment. But it did come to the U.S. loaded with standard amenities (navigation, super stereo, AWD, etc.) Suffice to say, it didn’t sell, and Acura/Honda went back to the drawing board.

What we have now, in the new RLX, is a front-wheel-drive car with a 3.5-liter, 310-horsepower V6, running through a six-speed automatic with the requisite paddle shifters on the back of the steering wheel. When you open the driver’s door to this nearly two-ton beast and slide into the leather-by-the-acre interior, you find you’re in a pretty spacious, well laid out and airy cabin. The center stack has an 8-inch screen for navigation and a seven-inch one below it for HVAC and the myriad of techno stuff that every car has to have these days if it wants to even barely entice a buyer.

There are small touches that endear you to the RLX – the center armrest console doubles as a cavernous cubby and opens three ways. Slide the cover back or open it with right- or left-mounted hinges. When you adjust the automatic temperature controls upwards (seeking more heat), each temperature degree is accompanied by a momentary flash of red, the universal car symbol for hot. Adjust it downward and there’s a small flash of blue (as in chattering teeth, blue cold.)

The side rear windows have pull-up shades and when you pull that shade up, a small triangular shade for the rear door quarter window emerges from its hiding place in the window frames. This car came equipped with some of the voguish safety gizmos like blind spot warning lights, to keep you aware of the cars creeping up on your flanks; and lane departure warning, to keep you firmly in that rigid lane (no thinking outside the lane or, heaven forfend, outside the box, please.)

On the road, the RLX acquits itself well as a quiet, mid-luxury sedan that does what you want it to do and will clearly do it without complaint. It’s more than 100 years since the auto industry started making these things and you’d think that by now they’ve figured out how to make cars that work well and are comfortable in the state of that working. At freeway speeds, there is little noise and once you get the 14-speaker stereo operating it will drown out what little road noise there is.

So the RLX is relatively fast, it has deep and comfortable seats (with both chilling and heating facilities) and it will take four or five people a long distance without tiring them out. Try that in your econobox.

Alas, there are lots of other midsize luxos out there on the showroom floors that give stiff competition to the RLX – Lincoln MKZ, BMW 5-series, Mercedes-Benz E-class, Audi A6, Lexus GS series and Cadillac XTS, to name a few. To up the ante, Acura is scheduled to release an all-wheel-drive hybrid version of the RLX later this year. With the help of a couple of electric motors on the rear wheels, it should produce 370 horsepower and perhaps be a competitive force in this crowded field.